You’d imagine that your car barrelling towards Belgium at 125mph, surrounded by police patrol cars, would be extra-scary if the car wouldn’t stop.

So it’s been a bad week for Frenchman Franck Lecerf, who buckled up for a trip to his local supermarket on Saturday, discovered too late that his car’s speed regulator had jammed and brakes failed, and found himself stuck in a high-speed race that ended 120 miles away in a Belgian ditch. Miraculously Lecerf, an epileptic whose Renault was specially modified, suffered no injuries.

His sounds like a bit of a one-off problem but it’s not long since Toyota had to recall 14 million cars with a similarly scary fault of accelerator pedals becoming trapped under floor mats, leaving graffitists the gift addition to the manufacturer’s tagging “The car in front is a Toyota”: “Make sure the car behind isn’t.”

In the US, it’s been a month since Boeing’s brand-new 787 Dreamliner jet was grounded after its batteries caught fire and faults forced emergency landings. Still no one has worked out why it isn’t airworthy.

Rare problems, certainly. But ones that are likely to erupt more and more as everything we own becomes more connected. Early mobiles were pretty reliable ways to make a call. Nowadays, so-called smartphones can do so much that they often freeze in a tantrum and refuse to do anything — and have batteries that last mere minutes. Soon, cars are going to be connected to the internet not just via a baby monitor-like satnav but with apps that monitor where the car is, find parking spaces, project traffic info on windscreens, and sync with phones and tablets.

I bet they’ll break down a lot more, too.

Homes, too, are entering the “smart” world. On the surface, it sounds great to have remotely controllable locks, curtains, heating and appliances. In reality, our location will be trackable and most burglars will probably upgrade their door-smashing skills to a Btec in hacking.

So at a time when machines are seen to be thrashing humans in the race for supremacy (overlooking the fact that we, er, made ’em), their occasional failure is a good time to take stock. Every year, so-called futurologists predict the imminent robot-takeover: the self-driving car (Google already has a prototype), the domestic bot that cleans, irons, cooks and cuddles.

Machines might not get cross and shouty and jealous, as humans do. But when they break, often no instruction manual or bod in a short-sleeved shirt offers a fix. That’s annoying when your laptop’s involved, and that presentation you slaved over is trapped in technology.

It’s clearly dangerous when a runaway car or plane with troublesome power supply takes off. But glitches will get more common as the “internet of things” takes off. Look ahead to apparently homeless people on the streets … because their smartphones have locked them out.

Aviation officials in the US have suggested the Dreamliner wasn’t scrutinised enough before being approved for take-off. Over here, some of our checks of the mechanised ready-meal-making process seem to have left something to be desired.

Seems like a good time to take a closer look at the machines already running our lives — not make more of them.